What You Need to Know about Team Assessments

Personal assessments have clear benefits in the business world. With good personal assessments, you can gain a better understanding of your unique work style, what drives you to succeed, and how you approach decision making. But what about team assessments? How do assessments for teams take those personal benefits and expand them to the people that you work with every day?

Team assessments benefit both the team and individual team members in a number of ways. Let’s take a look at some of the top benefits:

Naming the conflict. It’s inevitable that two or more people on any given team will come into conflict on a regular basis. Such conflict can be frustrating and counterproductive. But when you use the best assessments to build your team, those people who come into conflict will be able to name the reasons why their unique personality types tend to clash. When the source of the conflict becomes clear, it becomes much easier to predict, prevent, and work through conflict in a productive manner. People who used to frustrate one another will finally better understand the other’s perspective and thus be enabled to make their differences an asset rather than a liability.

Facilitating better work. As the team leader, when you gain a top-view perspective of how your individual team members work best, you can put them to work in much more productive ways. Maybe Tom and Sally work best when they’re competing. Maybe Jessica is most productive when she’s able to focus on her own. Whatever the assets of your team may be, understanding how and why each team member works best empowers you to organize them in the most efficient and effective way possible.

Bringing everyone onto equal footing. When team members understand each other’s strengths and limitations in an environment of open and honest communication, it enables everyone to make their voice heard. No personality type is better or worse than any other – they’re just different. When this truth gets laid out on the table, it makes it easier for team members to respect each other’s differences and find new ways to work together. It also makes it easier for the team leader to identify potential vulnerabilities in the team and nip those problems in the bud.